I recently purchased a Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player and are now looking for a good quality external hard drive of about 1 TB in size to store all my media on (I.E. videos, music files and pictures) so that when needed I can play them through the media player on my TV.

I am interested in all your experiences and any suggestions of a good one to choose.

[quote name='MadPenguin' post='761704' date='25-Feb-09 21:16'][/quote]
I agree with Joe about both brands. I've had two Seagates for the past few years and not had any failures with either. I wanted larger ones, so I gave those to a trusted friend and bought two more Seagates of 500 gig each. Haven't had them a year yet but they have not shown any errors. Good luck.

Thankyou for that suggestion. I have used WD for all my internal hard drives.

I have now narrowed it down to the WD MY-BOOK 1TB or the Seagate Freeagent Pro 1TB.

Can either of you or anyone else reading this forum provide me with some experience stories with these or point me in the direction of a location where I can find out more information. I have Googled both the products but the results I am getting don't provide me with all the information that I am after.

Some things that I am looking for - CACHE Size, download / upload speed, how they preform when running a 120 minutes movie file etc.

[quote name='MadPenguin' post='762113' date='26-Feb-09 21:40']Some things that I am looking for - CACHE Size, download / upload speed, how they preform when running a 120 minutes movie file etc.[/quote]
Don't quote me on it, but I suspect that all modern hard drives can pump out data faster than the USB bus can move it, so the drive rotation speed and cache size might not be that important once the data starts flowing.

[quote name='MadPenguin' post='762113' date='27-Feb-09 00:40'][/quote]
I can't answer any of the tech spec stuff either since my two are Seagate Free Agent Desktop 500 gig.

The only regret I have is that I didn't allow the install of Seagate's accompanying software because I didn't need it, or so I thought. It turns out the drives have a builtin "sleep" timer which shuts them down after just a few minutes of non-use. Normally that's not a problem since I only use them once or twice a day for backing up.

But they take too long to wake up. The Seagate software has a control for the sleep in it, but the doggone software won't install now and I can't get any HELP from Seagate. All they told me was to try re-installing and that won't even run any more.

The drives themselves perform OK and all I can tell you is that in my daily and weekly backups with Shadow Protect, the backup data transfer speed shown by SP depends on which internal SATA drive I'm backing up. One of 'em runs at about 16-17 MB/s and the other at about 19-20 MB/s which doesn't bother me any.

[quote name='Bigaldoc' post='762154' date='27-Feb-09 06:59']It turns out the drives have a builtin "sleep" timer which shuts them down after just a few minutes of non-use. Normally that's not a problem since I only use them once or twice a day for backing up.

But they take too long to wake up.[/quote]

Al,
Not quite sure what you mean by "they take too long to wake up." Does this sleeping interfere with your scheduled backups or does SP wake the drives before beginning the backup?

JohnA Child's Mind, Once Stretched by Imagination...Never Regains Its Original Dimensions

[quote name='MadPenguin' post='761704' date='26-Feb-2009 09:16']I recently purchased a Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player and are now looking for a good quality external hard drive of about 1 TB in size to store all my media on (I.E. videos, music files and pictures) so that when needed I can play them through the media player on my TV.

I am interested in all your experiences and any suggestions of a good one to choose.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

regards[/quote]

I have three My Book external drives in three different sizes (160, 320, & 500), but I note that the picture on the newer boxes is different from mine (which have circular, not vertical, lights), which suggests that their internal parts or specifications may be different as well. Mine have been very reliable. Here are some things to think about:

The first thing I did with my units was to convert them from FAT32 to NTFS. If the speeds are somewhere in the ball park it will help to keep the leads short, say 2 metres max, and get the best cables available, with gold connectors. It's no disgrace if they are second-hand, but get the best. Avoid any unnecessary device such as a hub, and if you must have one, shop carefully. If you are going to shuffle the deck with the contents of your drive by adding and removing files, then they will become fragmented, and for anything that requires short access times, you should defragment the drive, which seems to take forever with mine. I also partitioned one, but I regret it.

Do some homework (my source for this tidbit was Wikipedia) and check your calendar. USB2, as you may know, is forty times faster than USB1.1. USB3 is scheduled to be introduced in mid-2009, which is to say, late June if they are on schedule. Any USB2 device that you buy now may be obsolete (but backward compatible) the day after you drive it off the showroom floor. Maybe others will be able to fill in the details of USB3 for the benefit of all. You may also find that you do not want to use an external hard drive at all, if your hardware supports Blu-Ray.

[quote name='MadPenguin' post='761704' date='26-Feb-2009 09:16']I recently purchased a Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player and are now looking for a good quality external hard drive of about 1 TB in size to store all my media on (I.E. videos, music files and pictures) so that when needed I can play them through the media player on my TV.

I am interested in all your experiences and any suggestions of a good one to choose.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

regards[/quote]

I just received a PROMOTION from WD for an extremely slick-looking new My Book drive (you can win one if you enter their contest). This is a setup in which they specifically advertise streaming to all parts of your house, and it looks like it might fit the bill. Anyway, check the link if you are keeping an eye on the possibilities.

[quote name='peterg' post='764817' date='12-Mar-2009 01:06']I just received a PROMOTION from WD for an extremely slick-looking new My Book drive (you can win one if you enter their contest). This is a setup in which they specifically advertise streaming to all parts of your house, and it looks like it might fit the bill. Anyway, check the link if you are keeping an eye on the possibilities.[/quote]

peterg, thankyou for that link. That is simular to what I am after so might wonder off to the local computer hardware sales people and see what sort of deal that they can do for me.

Unfortunately the promotion is for American and European residents only and being that I am in the great land down under I am not able to enter. Seems a bit unfair but oh well I guess you can't have everything.

Thankyou to everyone else who posted here.

Once I have bought my Drive I will post back and let you all know what I ended up with and how it performs.